Monday, November 24, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Putinism a Cult With the Pluses and Minuses Thereof, Krasheninnikov Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, November 24 – Putinism is “a
pseudo-religious and quasi-political cult” which has arisen over the course of
the last year and which has “consolidated society around Putin,” including many
who were and at the level of political ideas remain opposed to the Kremlin
leader, according to Fedor Krasheninnikov.

The Yekaterinburg political
commentator argues in an essay posted online today that Vladimir Putin’s
success in uniting Russian society can best be understood if one analyzes what
is going on in religious or cultural terms, and he suggests that this cult like
all others carries with it risks for its authors as well as its followers (kashin.guru/2014/11/24/cult/).

Putinism, Krasheninnikov says, is a
cult rather than a political movement because it is based not on rational
calculations but on “pure irrationality,” on categories like “correctness,
truth, hope, faith,” and so on which are part of religious discourse but not at
the center of political conversations.

Viewed from a theoretical
perspective, the analyst says,”Putinism is more a charismatic apocalyptic
Protestant cult of the American type,” with the only difference being that
Putinism is primarily a cult promoted and organized by television rather than by
any more direct participation of its followers.

“As in Protestantism, stress is laid
on the personal emotions and experiences of the adepts: each must believe in
Putin as an individual” and then “each must become a missionary” on his behalf.
Such cults and Putinism is one of them, Krasheninnikov says, are based on the idea
of inspiration and have their own well-developed demonology.

Moreover, it and they have their own
distinctive eschatology: They talk about a fall from grace, a recovery led by a
Messiah and Savior, in this case Putin, and about a final victory over evil, a
pattern that gives new meaning to the lives of the followers and causes them to
look beyond their immediate problems in the name of this larger narrative.

“For the true adepts of the cult of
Putin,” he continues, “they do not need anything because they live according to
higher interests and are ready to sacrifice their personal well-being for
geopolitical triumphs,” in contrast to “national traitors” who are only
concerned with their personal situation and are ready to sell out “the
Greatness of the Motherland” for it.

In this new cult, “Orthodoxy as a
religion plays a definite role but hardly the one that the hierarchs of the
Russian Orthodox Church would like and not even the one which its opponents
have sometimes ascribed to it,” Krasheninnikov says.Today, “real Orthodoxy remains in Russia a
quite marginal sect,” affecting in an immediate way only a few percent of the
population.

But far more identify as Orthodox
and in this there is a link between the ROC and Putinism.On the one hand, he writes, “the apostles of
Putinism borrow from the church what they most need: the brand and the link
with the supernatural” without which Russia could never exceed the level of the
late Brezhnev period.

And on the other, Putinism takes
from Orthodoxy “the simplified form of work with the masses,” understanding as
does the Patriarchate that millions of people are prepared to identify and
believe but few of them are likely to accept the specific precepts of the faith
as the basis for action.

In essence, Krasheninnikov says, “all
those millions of people who without doing anything but consider themselves
Orthodox have received the chance without doing anything or changing their
lives to feel themselves also to be model citizens, true patriots, inheritors
of tradition, and so on.”

They are in all their actions, “justified
by faith,” to take the term of art from Martin Luther.

Obviously, any
cult with a savior has to have an apocalyptic doctrine because “a unique,
supernatural personality standing at its center cannot simply life and die –
the life and death of the savior must be a fateful moment in the life of all
humanity, the beginning of a new era (as in Christianity) or the death of gods
and chaos (as in paganism).”

Putinism “unfortunately”
is no exception. It has an apocalypse which is captured in talk about a nuclear
war and the notion that “if there is no Putin, there is no Russia.”The expectation it generates about the
approaching end of the world is a key precondition for “giving high meaning to the
most senseless life.”

Of course,
almost no one wants to “die in the flames of Armageddon in fact.” Indeed, most
followers believe that they will escape because evil will be defeated. But the
notion of such an end of the world justifies the notion that one must be hot or
cold about the savior and not lukewarm, something that works to his advantage.

For such a
cult, “any emotions are good, except for indifference,” and that,
Krasheninnikov says, “provides a key to understanding the tactics and practices
of all apocalyptic and charismatic cults, including Putinism.” They must never
leave the audience “without emotions” but rather act to ensure people will remain
at an emotional high.

The problem, of
course, is that “people cannot live in such a state for long, and the messiah
elevated to a pedestal must constantly crate obvious and undoubted miracles or
the adepts will be disappointed” and turn on him. Such “a social narcotic is
very strong but its effects are not long-lasting.”

Moreover, the
history of other cults suggests that “the peak of passionateness always comes
in the last months of its existence,” that the very elevation of feelings opens
the way for the very greatest of disappointments. In the current situation,
that has truly disturbing implications.

According to
the Yekaterinburg analyst, if Putin as Messiah does not triumph “over the world
evil” in the next few months at least at the level of Ukraine, “the situation
will rapidly move in the opposite direction” with disbelief and hatred
replacing faith, love and devotion.

In this
situation, Putin must either find new tasks abroad or direct his adepts toward “internal
enemies by provoking pogroms” and the like and then intervening with force for
and against them. But that will be a stage beyond the cult: it will be like Mao’s
“cultural revolution,” something that dealt with failures and then renewed the
cult before its final destruction.